In January, 2001, Half and Susanne Zantop, popular professors at Dartmouth College, were murdered in their home in New Hampshire. Clever detective work linked knife sheaths found at the scene to a pair of teen-agers, Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker, who lived in an isolated Vermont town thirty miles away. Confronted by police, the boys fled; eventually, they were tracked down in Indiana. Parker, the sidekick, struck a plea bargain that may free him in sixteen years, but Tulloch pleaded guilty and received a sentence of life without parole. Zuckoff and Lehr, who covered the case for the Boston Globe, examine in fascinating detail the ordinariness of the boys’ grudges—typical high-school controversies about the student council and the debate team—and how, in Tulloch’s twisted mind, the idea of random killing became an obsession.♦